After getting praise for its Fusion Zacate APU, it looks like AMD will switch its attention to Llano APUs that are aimed at mainstream desktop, business and AIO PC markets. The Llano is meant to be a direct competition to Intel's Core i5 and Core i3 CPUs and will feature a technology similar to the Hybrid CrossFireX that will pair up the GPU integrated in the Fusion APU with a discrete AMD Radeon card, including the HD 6000 series.

As you probably already know, The Llano APU is a part of AMD's Lynx platform and features dual core CPU paired up with a DirectX 11 GPU. The new multi-GPU technology will pair up the existing GPU with a discrete card which should provide additional performance boost and, of course, provide a much better display connectivity.

Donanimhaber managed to get their hands on on a couple of slides that show a performance improvement of a Llano APU with and without the additional discrete card and the it is quite impressive. We are quite sure that AMD will come up with something similar to Nvidia Optimus and the discrete GPU will be able to power down or up depending on the load.

Of course, we are still to see AMD's Lynx platform in action but we quite sure that more details will show up as we get closer to the launch date.

AMD's upcoming Llano APU series has been the talk of the town for quite some time, but we lacked quite a few details and much of its spec was in the realm of speculation.

However, now we can start to piece the puzzle together and it appears that the first Llano engineering samples will appear in March 2011. Production should start in June and we can expect availability in early Q3, provided AMD manages to stick to its schedule.

Llano will appear in several distinct versions, starting with three dual-core SKUs with Winterpark DirectX 11 graphics. These parts will have a 65W TDP and at least one of them will appear at a later date, towards the end of Q3. A triple-core version with the Beavercreek DX11 capable GPU will appear launch in Q3, with a 100W TDP. At the top of the pyramid we're looking at two proper quad-cores with Beavercreek graphics and a 100W TDP, both slated for Q3.

Quick reminder, Llano is a Socket FM1 part based on a new 32nm K10.5-derived core codenamed Husky. It will rely on the Hudson D3 Fusion Controller Hub (FCH) to communicate with the outside world and it will support DDR3 up to 1600MHz. The desktop Lynx platform and Llano processors will eventually replace AMD's mainstream lineup based on Callisto, Propus and Rana processors.

The Hudson FCH is a rather interesting piece of technology in its own right and since it will be used with all future AMD APUs we will post the full spec in a separate article.